Three Key Job Roles to Make Your Marketing Automation Rock

Marketing automation is a great solution to help drive your business. Marketers need to be more accountable, engage with customers and potential buyers, and also scale their activities. They are increasingly spending more dollars on technology to support these activities, and in the near future may even out pace CIOs on technology spend.

While there is a great deal of discussion on the undeniable advantage marketing automation can provide, there has been less discussion around what that means for your team. Technology is awesome, but it really is only as good as the people who implement it and manage it on a day-to-day basis. That's why it is important to think about your team structure when putting software systems in place.

Here are a few thoughts on who you need on your team to get the most out of marketing automation; the good news is, you may already have people on your team that have these skill sets.

Content Manager

Make sure you have an individual who can create a steady stream of great content. With marketing automation software, it becomes easier to scale programs (e.g. different job functions at different verticals), so you will need someone who can create effective content for the programs and re-purpose it. This could be a product marketer, an evangelist, someone from marketing communications manager, or a new hire such as a brand journalist. Ideally, this person will have some writing in his or her background.

Marketing Operations Manager

You will need someone who enjoys mechanics. Setting up integrations, key reports, segmentation, and flows in the system are just some of the activities a good marketing operations person will do. This is one of the most critical roles to get right because they are essential to building the technological framework. A good framework = total and complete awesomeness. A bad framework = wasted time and added expense, which we all know equals bad things. A good candidate for this is anyone on your team who enjoys technical details, has a good mind for process and how things work, and feels happy when in Excel.

Nurturing Manager

This role makes sure you are squeezing the juice from the orange. They will work with your content manager and make sure their programs have the right content mapped to the buying cycle. It is also a very critical role because when done well, since nurtured leads can produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. It is ideal to have someone in this role who understands your buyer and user personas, and also is very good at thinking through the right workflows. I have seen strong marketing programs people succeed in this role.

I hope these suggestions are useful and help you think about the right team to make marketing automation rock in your office! What other players do you have on your marketing automation team? We would love to hear about them.

How Winning Customer Service Can Help Win Back Lost Customers

It's estimated that small businesses are losing up to 40 percent of their customers each year, winning customer service is a strategy for winning back lost customers.

Think that the statistics are wrong? How many customers can you stand to lose each year? 10 percent? 20 percent? Regardless of the number, each customer lost means that your organization has to work that much harder to win an extra customer to make up for the lost one. With the general business estimate of between 5-10x the cost to acquire a new customer compared to maintaining an existing customer, it makes absolutely sense to have a winning customer service strategy in place to keep customers or be able to win back lost customers.

Winning customer service will be the key to keeping your existing customers and the most powerful weapon you have to win back the lost customers that may have gotten away.

A customer you lose is a customer your competitor gains

Many business professionals and small business owners assume that some customer loss is just a cost of doing business. Sure, it's true that we can't please everyone and in the end some people will be disappointed, but this brings us back to the original question, how many customers are you willing to give to your competitors. Oh yes, the competition. When we talk about customer loss, those customers are going somewhere, they don't just stop doing business.

Every customer you lose is a customer one of your competitor probably gains. So winning customer service is crucial to keeping those heard earned customers. You don't want a lack of customer attention to let your customers slip away.

So how are you going to win back those lost customers? Customer service experts agree, it's not a given that once you gain a customer that you will keep them forever. And when you lose a customer, a specific strategy needs to be executed to win back the customer.

4 Effective ways winning customer service helps to win back lost customers

Four effective principles are part of the best customer service tips to get you on the right track and winning back those important customers.

1. Examine problems creating customer losses

There's always a reason why you lose a customer. Maybe it's price. It could be lack of features. The quality of your service or product can drive customers to your competitors. Maybe it's your customer service approach. The point is, in order to win back customers and prevent future customers from leaving, you have to understand why they are leaving in the first place. What are the problems that are driving customers away.

Sometimes it may be something unique to one individual customers, but usually it's a general trend with something doing wrong in your organization or with your offering. Identifying and correcting it is the first step to winning back the customer.

2. Winning customer service takes responsibility for customer service

It may not be your fault, but a lost customer is your problem. You have to take responsibility for your customer service losses and showing customers you're responsible and making steps to fix the problem is the next most critical step to winning back the customer.

Award-winning customer service training is a way to start taking responsibility for the type of service your organization delivers. When you approach a lost customer and can specifically state what has been done or how things have been fixed, you've opened the door for that customer to come back.

3. Make a special value incentive

You customer has already been burned in some way. How can you regain customer trust? It's not easy and often times it's going to cost you. It may not be practical to offer an aggressive deal to everyone, but it's a must for your biggest customer losses, or those customers that represent the most potential for revenue. But then again, can you make some special incentive that can be applied to any customer walking out the door? If you're saying no, think of it like this. Would I like something less than I normally get and keep this customer or am I willing to settle for nothing.

As long as you're meeting your basic costs, you have to consider that even the most aggressive discount is at least brining is something more than zero. Zero is what you get when you refuse to address the lost customer. Zero is the price you pay when you lack a winning customer service experience. You've lost a customer. You've lost revenue today. You've lost revenue tomorrow, and forever.

4. Winning customer service centers on exceptional communication

Communication is the final step in using winning customer service to win back that lost customer. By now, if you've been able to make some progress with getting back your customer, you've just begin to recreate that customer relationship. It's not done. You can't go back to how you've been doing things. You will need to continue working on and developing this tender relationship even after you've won back the customer. Customer service communication is the key to ensuring that this customer doesn't walk out on you again.

Winning customer service recognizes that its customer relationships that matter most. Improving customer communication and taking customer service to the next level is the way to ensure that you catch the warning signs that lead to customer loss in the first place. By communicating effectively with customers you get the hints that there's trouble with the customer relationship. You can catch customer dissatisfaction and fix it before it leads to outright customer loss.

What's your take on winning back customers?

These four principles are simple and effective at helping your organization develop the type of customer relationship that keeps customers loyal and creates winning customer service organizations. These principles are a central part of a winning customer service strategy. Your customers aren't asking for everything. They just want to feel valued. They want to feel respected. There's no better way than by creating a winning strategy that shows customers, even those who have chosen to walk out on your that you still care about them and are willing to do what it takes to get them back.

Exciting Ways to Market Your Business in 2013

The explosion of digital and social media has opened up exciting new avenues for marketers and advertisers. Never before have there been so many ways a business can get their message out to their target market. Some are new tactics while others are new takes on older methods. Here are some of the exciting new marketing strategies for 2013.

Content Marketing

The term 'content marketing' only came on the scene recently. Also known as 'inbound marketing,' content marketing is the use of articles, blogging, podcasts, videos and other content to answer prospect questions and help generate sales. The goal of content marketing is to create trust, answer objections and illustrate ways clients can use products.

One good example of this from Coca Cola. They have decided to transition their tradition of 'Creative Excellence' to the much different platform of 'Content Excellence.' That means they want to create content so valuable and interesting it is shared and talked about. The 30-second TV commercial is no longer the best way to get close to consumers. Coke is moving to a collaborative strategy that involves their audience much more than before.

Public Relations

Public relations used to concern itself with sending press releases and trying to get clients in the media. Now that many people get their news and information in social media, public relations has taken on more of a marketing role.

PR departments are working closer with marketing professionals than ever before. Public relations consultants are using their ability to tell stories to help create new narratives for marketing.

User-Generated Content

One of the fastest ways to create a marketing impact is to allow users to generate content. It gives consumers a chance to interact with their favorite brands, and marketers are able to rapidly create lots of content that will improve their presence in search engine rankings.

User generated content can be as simple as encouraging fans to make YouTube videos. Other popular methods are setting up online communities and asking users to contribute articles and blog posts.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing has been on the brink of exploding into the big time for several years. While mobile usage has clearly made huge gains, marketers were never sure the best way to take advantage of the trend; recently they have made great strides in creating content exclusively for mobile.

For example, many businesses have created their own applications that help consumers get information they need. Whether for iPhone, Android or other mobile platforms, there will be more use of 'apps' to exploit the power of mobile marketing.

Promotional Products

Promotional products have been a cornerstone of marketing for decades. One might think this marketing method does not mix with new channels like social media. Interestingly, promotional products fit well into new marketing strategies. Since social media is entirely digital, promotional products give marketers the opportunity to make their message more real.

Promotional products are largely used in person and must be touched and handled physically. They are perfect for creating a three-dimensional aspect to a brand message. Promotional products move a brand from the digital realm into the real world.

There has never been a more exciting time in the history of marketing. Changing technology has allowed consumers to play a much bigger role in the conversation around their favourite brands. In the past, marketing was 'one-way' with advertisers blasting their message to the world. Marketing has become more dynamic with multiple voices influencing the direction of the brand and its role in the marketplace. Content marketing, mobile marketing, public relations, user-generated content and promotional products are leading these changes for 2013.

Achieving Success in a B2B Lead Generation

One step at a time.

Securing success in business is constantly a difficult journey. It involves a lot of money, time, effort, dedication and analysis. Besides, reaching the top requires a step-by-step endeavor. The same is true with B2B lead generation. Achieving success demands one step at a time.

Business-to-business (B2B) lead generation is just the start of the many steps in the whole sales process. What comes after is as important as the beginning. Never ever think that once qualified leads are identified, sales process ends.

Though the sales leads show interest in buying, it doesn't follow that they are ready to buy. Prospects that are sales-ready comes only in a small percentage of the total leads generated. It is therefore your responsibility to take care of the other leads. Lead nurturing is the major cause how to convert prospects into closed sales.

Think of applying these steps to have the best chance of being successful in your efforts. Each step is independent with each other.

Step 1. Distribute information immediately.

To make them feel that they are valued as customers, let it be a habit to keep them updated. Educate them by giving information about the company, the services it offers and product specifications. Serve them well by being respectful and at the same time professional. Respond to their inquiries as fast as possible. However, don't push them to purchase. Connect with them to create relationship and to build trust.

In addition, it would be very helpful to:

•  learn beforehand the right answers to diver
• se questions.
•  store information in a computer database to send it via email or downloads.
•  have enough supply of printed materials.
•  keep sales and marketing people prepared.

Step 2. Nurture leads by responding to all inquiries.

It would be an advantage to possess a computerized marketing database. This is a tool to respond to all inquiries swiftly. It is a law to all firms not to make the customers wait.

Step 3. Identify what kind of leads your firm are targeting.

Determining what kind of leads the company are serving is a golden rule. No one would waste everything to a customer who will never buy a product. In this case, let the marketing and sales people identify which of the leads generated are the qualified sales leads.

Step 4. Analytically and critically process lead distribution to sales.

After separating the qualified leads from those who are not, it is a must to concentrate on the qualified leads. As stated earlier, it would do no good if efforts are directed to customers who decided not to buy. Lastly, assure that lead distribution for sales team and others involved is easily accessible.

Step 5. Innovate a program that would nurture the not-yet-qualified leads?

Leads that are not yet qualified can be potential prospects in the future. It is highly recommended that you will create a program that would nurture these leads. Uphold the principles of building trust and be committed in exercising the entire endeavor. Research unfolds that three (3) out of four (4) sales are those often ignored.

It is then better that a separate team must keep in touch with those not-yet-qualified leads. Cold-calling, unlike other mediums, is more effective to generate responses. Let it then be made frequently.

Step 6. Establish a program to keep tabs on the results of every step in the sales process.

Having a program that could measure and track the outcome will be essential to evaluate the success rate of the lead generation process. This program includes an identification of costs (per lead and per sale), know which efforts worked and determining whether the entire lead generation is profitable.

Because leads are the life blood of the organization, monitoring the progress of these programs must be made habitually. Moreover, correcting and enhancing these undertakings will be of extreme importance in achieving success in a B2B lead generation.

Never forget, all it takes is just one step at a time.

This post originally appeared at Belinda Summer's EzineArticles

This article is an original contribution by Belinda Summers.

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Why is My CTR So Damn Low?

With Google Adwords (or SEO for that matter) when you find a keyword that converts well and that gives you good orders/leads at a great cost per conversion you want more from it. You want to squeeze as much traffic out of it as possible as you know that the more traffic you get the more sales you will get.

Unfortunately this can sometimes be tricky ' sometimes you can bid up a keyword into position 1 but even once there it's click through rate (CTR) remains pitiful. You check that you are not abusing your customers in your ad copy and see what some of the other competitors are doing with their ads and you find that (as objectively as possible) that you have strong ad copy. So wassup?

Today we are going to look at the process you should go through when you find yourself a bit stumped as to why your click through rate (CTR) is so damn low, and we will of course then give you some pointers on what you can do to improve it.

First up ' What is a good click through rate for Adwords?

This does vary greatly with each keyword, and in fact each auction as there are many influencing factors e.g. a domain that is almost synonymous with a specific product (think Amazon on book related searches), or whether or not there are product listing ads within the results, and if so where they are positioned etc etc.

all of that aside there are some general averages that are typically called upon at times like this data gathered by Accuracast:

You will probably have an idea of the specific auction peculiarities for your top keywords so can adjust due to this to work out whether your CTR is poor or not.

Here is a keyword that we were confused by this week for one of our clients:

Although the keyword is running in an average position of 1.5 the CTR is just 3.74%. Using the above table we can see that this is well below average for this position. The cost per conversion (£12.97) for this client is very good so we want more traffic; it looks like we cannot get into a much higher position and the issue is obviously CTR. Here is the process that we went through to figure out why:

Make a list of potential reasons

• Ad copy is poor compared to competitors
• Ad copy is not relevant to the keyword or to the intent of the searcher
• If broad match keyword are we getting irrelevant searches?
• Do we have a low impression share through day parting and compete aggressively at that time?
• Are we also running on the search partner network ' how does performance vary?
• What about ad extensions ' are we missing any critical ones?

Review ad copy

Here we refer back to best practices ' see this infographic on how to write the best PPC ads. In this case the keyword is exact match so we know that all of the searches are relevant to the ad we have written. We looked through all of the competitor ads and could not see any reason why ours were losing ' we had a good clear attention grabbing headline, strong call to action and ads that were focused to the searchers intention with this keyword.

Reviewing Adwords Auction Insights to see what competitors are doing

Another report that was released in 2012 is the Auction Insights report, this allows you to compare some of your performance indicators directly with specific competitors ' at first glance it can be a little confusing but with a little interpretation a fair amount can be learned from this report. To get the keyword insights you need to select an individual keyword and then click on 'keyword details' and then choose the option 'Auction insights' as shown in the screenshot below.

Here is the auction insights report for the keyword in question:

The first thing to look at here is the 'position above rate' as this shows you who is beating you and how much of the time they are beating you. You can see here that 2 of the competitors have a position above rate of 99% so this means that when our ads are shown together they almost always rank above us.

If you now look at the impression share column you can see that we had our ads served for 100% of the available impressions for this keyword whereas the 2 competitors that are beating us have a much lower impression share ' this could be because they are only running ads at specific times of the day. It could theoretically be because their bid is too low to get all of the available impressions but that does not make sense considering that when they do show they always show above our client.

So; in order for us to show above them more of the time we will need to bid up during peak trading hours.

Determining where our impressions are coming from? Google Search or the Search Partner Network

The next thing that we looked into is the network that we are running on and it quickly became apparent that our CTR in Google search was very good when our ad was shown in the top positions above the search results; this perhaps accounts for the good quality score of 10/10.

However; most of the impressions came from the search partner network when we were in lower positions. The take away from this is that we could split out the search partner network targeting into a separate campaign to better understand the performance and also to bid differently for the two ' perhaps we need to bid a little higher for the search partner network than we do for Google search.

Checking Ad Extensions

another reason why CTR may suffer is if you do not use relevant ad extensions: For example if you are a restaurant and you do not run call extensions to allow mobile users to click to call or if you do not link up your Places extension to show address details then you could lose clicks and sales. In Adwords you can check on the part of your ad or ad extension that was clicked ' in the example below you can see the comparison between the headline, the product extension and the ad sitelinks.

This data does not mean that site links are bad ' they probably help the CTR overall as they allow your ad to take up more space on the page and to say more about your offering but the fact that most people click on the headline is probably more down to the nature of how people are used to using a search engine. It does look like the product extensions help the click through rate as when they are shown we get a better click through rate than on the headline as people are interested in specific products.

Looking at this I cannot see any action that needs to be taken.

Other things to examine

A number of the factors we have looked at here in this post can be found under the 'Segment' option on the keywords tab (shown in screenshot below).

Play around with the different reports under here to see if and where any data stands out.

Considering what we have found through the auction insights data it would be interesting to know the performance of this keyword by time of day; unfortunately the smallest unit of time available under segments is by day. Under the dimensions tab you can get a performance report by hour of the day but this is at ad group and campaign levels only, so you would need to put a keyword in it's own ad group to work out at what time of day the CTR is suffering.

Conclusions

From this analysis we have the action points of:

1) Create a separate campaign targeting the search partners and to bid slightly higher in that campaign for this keyword.

2) Test a slightly higher bid in Google search too.

It's important to remember that ads can always be improved too and to keep testing.

Are You Responsive to Your Customers?

While trying to choose an 'R' word for this post I considered reality, responsibility, relativity, respect and several others but decided on responsive as a particularly apropos topic in that I could talk about a lot of the other 'R' words using responsive as the context. See what you think.

What do your clients or customers expect in terms of responsiveness? Do they expect you to respond instantly to their every need, whim or desire? It they do you might consider them the customer from hell if they provide you with little revenue but with lots of grief. On the other hand if you are making seven figures from them you might be willing to ask how high they'd like you to jump in satisfying their requests. So I guess in this respect responsiveness is relative.

When do your clients and customers expect you to respond to them? Responsive for one can be construed as extreme tardiness for another. If your service level agreement, for example, specifies 24/7 service and they find that no one is available at 2 AM on a Sunday morning when they are getting ready for a major announcement on Monday then they will probably consider you non-responsive. If, on the other hand, you've trained them to expect to wait days for a return phone call then calling them back the same day might be considered wonderfully responsive. So responsiveness can indeed by relative.

Another consideration when it comes to responsiveness is how you respond. Do you use a CRM or auto respond system or do you provide a personal response to requests via website or email? Do you have a 'feature rich' (i.e. overly complex) menu driven telephone system where it is virtually ' or even literally ' impossible to get to a human being? Or do you have a person answering the phone? It may be 'cheaper' to lay off the phone answering employees and use an automated system, but that really depends on the criteria you use to define 'cheaper.' The bean counters probably aren't including churn and attrition due to severe customer dissatisfaction in the calculation but it could be having a huge impact on the company's revenues.

What do you consider to be responsive in your business? Do your customers agree with you? Do you know if they agree with you? If not, they may be feeling that you don't really respect their needs and you won't really know that unless you figure out that very few of them are remaining repeat customers. And that's way too late in the life cycle of your business to find out because by then it's likely that you will be at the end of it way too soon!

I'd love to read your responses to this post. Please do comment below or send me a message via the website contact form. I promise you that I will respond to you ' promptly, courteously and in full. Thanks for reading.

Musings on Relationships, Experience, Engagement, and Relationship

It occurs to me that we, the folks in the world of business, are blind to relationship, relationships, experience, and engagement. It occurs to me that we just don't get it! Let's start with relationships and work our way through to relationship (no there is no typo here).

Customer Relationship Management

Whilst we talk about relationships, sometime a lot, in business it occurs to me that we don't get relationships. That was the whole issue with CRM and still is. Within the context of CRM, R stood for let's put in technology that makes me more powerful and allows me to control you. That is still what relationship stands for! It take a genuine connection with our own humanity, our feelings, our existence to get relationships. If you haven't seen this TED video then I invite you to listen to it. Enjoy!

Customer Experience and Customer Engagement

Now the talk has moved on. It is no longer cool to talk about customer relationships. Now the talk is of customer experience and customer engagement. And, who is doing the talking? The same people who didn't and don't get relationships. And they are equally ignorant of experience and engagement. Are you up for getting to get what experience is for human beings? Are you up for getting what engagement is for human beings? Are you up for getting the experience of relationship? Then I offer you this video ' please see it through the end:

Relationship: life itself is relationship

Are the soil, the plant, the sun, the rain, the bee separate? Of course they are! Our language tells us that they are. But is that really the case? Can we treat these separately doing what we want without consideration of the bigger picture?

Of course, we cannot. They exist in relationship! What happens when we take out bees as we are doing right now? Who pollinates? Without pollination what happens to the plants? And when the plants that require pollination by bees collapse? What happens to us? All that is, is in relationship. That is the central point of ecology, of systems thinking. Get it?

The 'I' is an illusion, a very persuasive one, yet nonetheless an illusion. You don't believe me? Please allow me to put you in a vacuum and then I want you to tell me that you are an 'I'. We exist in relationship. All there is, is relationship. Yet, we are not mindful of this especially when it comes to the world of business. And so I leave you with the following infographic on climate change. Why? Because climate change (like our feelings) is an indicator of the health of relationship of life itself: